COURT OF
PUBLIC OPINION Written By Mark Fierro
P
eople find themselves drawn to law school and to the practice of law for a wide variety of reasons. Hunter Peterson, a student at the William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV, found himself thinking about law school after a stint with the Peace Corps in Africa left him 70 pounds lighter with his body decimated by loathsome parasites. His young wife was suffering through medical issues from the recent birth of their new daughter. Not exactly the “Dad, I’ve decided to take a year off backpacking in Europe before going back to school” kind of life arc.
focus on scholastic achievement — though that would be part of the criteria — this scholarship would target students with professional, working life experience outside of the classroom for at least one year after college.
“I was in Guinea in West Africa and I was genuinely having a terrible time not being able to work on the issues that I was passionate about,” Peterson recalled. “Poor water, not enough food. I ate rice and raw peanuts a lot of the time. One of the family farms I was trying to help with burned down, and I got a few burns trying to put out the fires.
“I personally went to law school later in life,” said Mirejovsky. “I stepped away, I started a business, I worked in the legal industry. I got distracted. I had to go back and be a law student as a bit of an older adult.
“At the same time there was a real child and spousal abuse issue there, which I wasn’t allowed to work on. Trying to keep the bugs off you while lying down in the shelter at night listening to kids being beaten outside is emotionally scarring. I realized the best use of my time was to come back home to Wyoming and start planning to go to law school.” As improbable as it sounds, while Peterson was in Africa, on the other side of the world there was a new scholarship in its infancy that practically had Peterson’s name on it. The funding the scholarship and some of the core ideals behind it were being framed out among Daniel Hamilton, dean of the Boyd School of Law, and Sam Mirejovsky and Ashley Watkins of the Sam & Ash law firm. The idea was rather novel. Rather than a sole
The result was the Sam & Ash Scholarship program, a series of renewable scholarships supporting the Boyd School of Law. The hope was that these students would bring a sense of direction in life as well as empathy for their future clients.
“I recognized very quickly that it’s a hard thing to have to go from earning a paycheck and paying rent and having a family to support to going back and having to pay for an expensive education. It’s hard to re-enter. It’s a tough thing to do.” Tough, but that life experience also brought with it the advantages of a much broader context of what it means to be productive. “I looked around and noticed that other students who had done the same thing as me, who had stepped away for a period of time and got some real-life experience, brought something different to the classroom,” Mirejovsky said. “I saw them graduating and they hit the ground running. They had contacts, they had jobs lined up because they had been in the workforce and they knew what to do.” For her part, Watkins said the year she took off between college and law school changed the entire direction VEGASLEGALMAGAZINE.COM | 17
